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Photoshop will not be able to make the photo better quality without you personally airbrushing all of the bits to add definition. It the original picture is pixelated the only thing you can try to bo is soften or smooth. This will loose some of the pixelation but it will loose the clarity of the picture. It is always a trade if the quality of the oroiginal picture is not that good.

I somewhat figured that, But i had to find affirmation to that effect.
Also, when you mention airbrush? do you mean physically or digitally? I'm guessing Digitally, b/c there's no way that I could do a photo justice on my own, I'm definately NOT an artist.

I'm not sure if PS Elements has an "Unsharp Mask" filter, but if it does, you can try it. Play with the settings in the filter a bit to get better results.

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The best way to improve a poor quality image, albeit a bit work intensive, is to resample/resize* it. For example, if you have a 512x512 image, resample* to 1024x1024. Now the same image has 4 times as many pixels.

Then, you can apply, either image wide or with a tool, a sharpen mask/effect. Tool is better, because you can control the depth of the sharpen, especially if you have pressure control, and you can be more selective about which parts of the image gets sharpened and which don't. You can then use whatever other editing tools (soften, blur, etc) to clean up the image as you see fit.

*Most graphics sw that has resize/resample will include an "Interpolation" setting in the effect, such as "linear" or "Bi-cubic" etc. Experiment with each of these to see which works best. If the sw warns you that the effect is "not undoable" then make several copies (imagea.jpg, imageb.jpg, imagec.jpg, etc) before applying this.

Edited by NQx, 05 February 2007 - 05:23 AM.

Dyslexic agnostic insomniacs stay up all night wondering if there really is a dog

A free program you may wish to try is 'Jpeg Enhancer' by Vicman - it can't turn your photos into perfect ones but helps remove artifacts and the "blotchy look" from photos - which in turn, often make them 'appear' to be better/sharper than they really are.

Vicman is the company who provides this free (and other free photo editing programs) - it doesn't take a lot of space on one's computer either.

Although this won't add detail, if you've already stretched, scaled, or resized the image, "smart blur" will help you reduce the amount of fuzziness in the new image.

It's a fairly easy process:

- choose "smart blur".
- set quality to high
- in the preview window, pan the image to a blurred/pixelated portion of the image
- zoom in (at least 100%)
- move top slider to approx. 10%
- move bottom slider higher than 10%, simultaneously watching the preview window to confirm when the smoothing effect kicks in.
- once you've found a suitable percentage for the bottom bar, reduce the top bar percentage (slowly). Watch the preview window. When pixelation reappears stop reducing the percentage. Increase the percentage slightly in order to create a non-pixelated image.
- reduce the bottom bar percentage until pixelation occurs. When it does, increase the percentage slightly to eliminate the effect.

Usually smart blur values hover around 3.5 percent, but depending on how badly the jpeg is affected, this can vary. And usually the top and bottom percentages differ by less than 1%.

Give it a try. It also works for poor quality jpegs. And it doesn't create the same darkening effect that the unsharp mask might produce. But you'll probably have to use both in tandem.

Yeah i thought so too, the blur tool usually helps to improve the image quality though its a bit tricky to use. You might end up with something totally different but its always good to give it a try. You might learn a new trick or two.